c:.:? C/ o C> ðc:> o o ,. . terview people who're saying, 'God, I'm glad the Americans won-my kids have fl h i1 ,,, a us to et. Such criticism poses the paradox that the people in charge of the war-Rums- feld; his deput)r, Paul Wolfowitz; Con- doleezza Rice-are Gingrich's closest al- lies. "I think Rumsfeld is a terrific guy, I think Wolfowitz is a great guy, but I think the underlying fact is that you have Bill Clinton's generals designing a cam- paign that is not very creative, and it's not very clever," Gingrich says. "} think it's important to recognize you have a very thin layer of Bush appointees over the Clinton bureaucrac " Gingrich notes that George C. Mar- shall, Franklin Roosevelt's Army Chief of StaH: forced hundreds of colonels into retirement before Pearl Harbor, because he lacked confidence in them. "This Administration currently has fired nobody, and that's very dangerous, be- cause it says that, no matter how medio- cre you are, if you can give a good press conference you can keep your job. I think the President has got to be tougher, at every level." Everyone in Washington agrees that the September 11 th attacks were at least in part the result of a monumental Amer- ican intelligence failure, but Gingrich 52 THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 26, 2001 ;'/:::::::?::;:!::;:: ::..< .:. .:::: :: t: t :.:?-; ;: f ::;.r: : ::::\;:::\:::. x ': .::" ..? :. :. ':':: i(_ ," .:": ::"' . :. :.:'.:;.-: .;:" ..: "' ' .:" 2 (<f 6éV<- . takes issue with those who believe that now is not the moment for recrimina- tion. The Central Intelligence Agency, he says, should be reorganized from top to bottom, and heads should roll. "We need to hold some people accountable for the last couple of years," he says. "I don't think you can just walk off and say that the very people who couldn't find bin Laden for six years are now looking for bin Laden, and sa 'Gee, don't you feel comfortable now? They're more se- rious now.' I just think you need a really thorough overhaul in the entire intelli- - ." gence commurut)r. Critics of the C.I.A. have laid the blame for its failures pardy on a Clinton- era directive restricting recruitment of operatives with questionable human- rights records. The policy was defended recently before the Senate Intelligence Committee by a C.I.A. lawyer. Gingrich was dismayed, and says that Bush should have fired the lawyer before he returned to his office from Capitol Hill. So far, at least, Bush has been more inclined to try to bolster the morale of his intelligence-gathering agencies, conducting pep rallies at both the C.I.A. and the EB.I. "It'll be interesting to see if George Bush moves from being leader of the American people, which he clearly now is, to genuine Commander-in- Chie " Gingrich says. "A Commander- in-Chief issues commands." G ingrich, like Churchill, is one of those figures who :fix on dangers only dimly perceived by others, and whose urgent warnings are often un- heeded because of the messenger's com- plicated political biograph Gingrich issued his first warnings about the need to confront terrorism in his 1984 book "Window of Opportunit)r," and he has been a serious student of the subject ever since. In 1997, Gingrich and President Clinton jointly launched a commission to assess the near- and long-term threats to American national securit)r, and when Gingrich resigned from Congress he joined the commission, which was headed by former Senators Warren Rudman and Gary Hart. The commission's final report, issued in J anu warned of the vulnerability of "the U.S. homeland" to "catastrophic attack." Throughout the summer, Gingrich met with defense intelligence officials in the Pentagon to discuss how Secretary Rumsfeld might begin to warn Ameri- cans about the nation's domestic vulner- ability. On September 11th, Gingrich says, he was saddened, but not at all sur- prised, by the attacks in New York and Washington, and he believes they may be followed by more catastrophic ones. "The two things I worry about most are a nuclear weapon and an engineered in- fectious disease," he says. "The third thing I worry about is an aerosolized an- thrax delivered by air, or delivered through a subwa because a subway would act as a pneumatic system to spread it. The Army actually tested that years ago. It's very frightening." Then he adds, "Take the four airplanes, except this time have them be conventional trucks in the major tunnels during rush hour. And there are a lot of other things 1'm not going to get into. But there are lots of conventional vulnerabilities in a high civilization that cause a lot of damage, O.K.?" Gingrich believes that the two crucial aspects of homeland security-detection and prevention of attacks, and dealing with the consequences of catastrophe- are now woefully inadequate. "Because the victims all tragically died, the World Trade Center attack understressed our medical system," he says. "If we'd have